It is too early to know what happened to Flight MH17. It may indeed have been shot down by Russian separatists, as the Ukraine government and its western allies are claiming. Or it may have been shot down by forces linked to the Ukraine government.
If separatists were responsible, it is likely to have been a horrible mistake rather than a deliberate attack on a civilian airline, since it is very difficult to see what possible benefits such an attack could bring to the separatist cause.
Naturally that isn’t the way the Kiev government and its supporters are presenting it. The Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has said ‘This is not an incident, this is not a catastrophe, this was a terrorist attack‘ – a representation of Ukraine separatists as well as the attack that is clearly aimed at an already sympathetic audience.
The bug-eyed warmonger John McCain has said there will be ‘hell to pay’ if Russia is responsible. The no-less hawkish Hilary Clinton has called for the world to ‘ put Putin on notice that he has gone too far’, as if the Russian president personally ordered the plane to be shot down.
For the time being, the Obama administration has limited itself to accusing Russia of indirect responsibility by arming separatists and ‘inflaming’ the situation in Ukraine.
Arming rebels, as we all know, is something that only the United States and its allies are allowed to do, and it goes without question that the West would never do anything to ‘inflame’ conflict, either in Ukraine or anywhere else.
<< by Matt Carr - read full article >>
